The Flat Woman
The Flat Woman, a novel by Vanessa Saunders
I read books I like or enjoy all the time, but less often do I have the opportunity to read something I admire. New Orleans author Vanessa Saunders’ forthcoming The Flat Woman, her debut novel, was so good I didn’t even mind reading it as an e-galley (read: PDF), eagerly sitting at my desk instead of sprawling out in my normal reading posture. The idea of a “feminist magic-realist ecological dystopia” sounds didactic, but Saunders deftly avoids preaching, instead showing us a simplified and constrained view of a world undergoing collapse in a way completely familiar. By the end, I was turning pages as fast as I could click.
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Only two figures in the novel have names: Bertha, who owns a diner, and Elvis. The mother, the aunt, the girl (who grows into the woman), the man, Mr. Boss—under Saunders’ pen, these characters exist as both individuals and archetypes. Even heavy industry is reduced to one company: the sinister, omnipresent Pops Cola. The limited, nameless cast also helps us inhabit the mental world of the narrator, the girl, by reinforcing the roles the others play in her life, satisfactorily or not. The nameless girl lives in a world in which environmental degradation’s effects are galloping along unabated, to such an extent that the killing of birds (by means other than industrial pollution) is “bird terrorism,” punishable by hard labor in prisons that provide workers for the cola company. The girl’s mother is convicted of the murder of a number of seagulls and sent to prison, leaving the girl in the dubious, inconsistent care of the aunt. She grows up, drops out of college, and meets a man in a band (everyone who’s ever dated a guy in a band will scream “No!” at this point), ultimately moving out west with him. The environmental problems are even worse in the ashy shadows of the Pops Cola plant, with animals increasingly behaving in ominous and unusual ways and residue accumulating on outdoor surfaces every day.
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For a story that is in many respects so grim, The Flat Woman is screamingly funny. The most surreal aspect is the girl’s “unclear boundaries,” which Saunders makes literal by having her briefly take on physical attributes of what she sees while upset: seagull feathers, goldfish scales, the black glass of a skyscraper. (Repeatedly, she is told to try therapy, and that she must tell the man about this before he finds out on his own.) Additionally, the presence of a quasi-homoerotic all-male Elvis impersonator encampment/boy band/cult is gasping-for-air hilarious—and, in general, the kind of thing I expect to be floating around somewhere in Nevada.
At about 150 pages, The Flat Woman goes by quickly: while I think Saunders is right to leave her eerie and sharp-edged world incompletely sketched, it’s so tantalizing that some readers will find themselves jonesing for a tiny bit more. The book doesn’t last long, but its images do. I’ll close with the simplest praise I can give a book: I want to read her next one.
The Flat Woman will be published by the University of Alabama Press and Fiction Collective 2 on November 12. uapress.ua.edu.
